Wikipedia Community Vote On License Migration 95
mlinksva writes "A Wikipedia community vote is now underway on migrating to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as the main content license for Wikimedia Foundation projects. This would remove a legal barrier to reusing Wikipedia content (now under the Free Documentation License, intended for narrow use with software documentation, because Wikipedia started before CC existed) in other free culture projects and vice versa."
The "later version" clause (Score:5, Informative)
Existing content contributed to Wikipedia was done under the GFDL license, which like the standard GPLv2 includes a "or later version" clause. Wikipedia's license includes this clause.
The latest version of the GFDL now contains a section I think written to specifically allow Wikimedia to do this. See section 11, "Relicensing" here:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html [gnu.org]
Backwards compatible (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Existing content? (Score:5, Informative)
That clause seems to be written specially for Wikipedia:
Neat legal hack...
Re:Existing content? (Score:3, Informative)
The GFDL license [gnu.org], under which the current Wikipedia content is licensed, has a "or any later version" clause, which Wikipedia uses [wikipedia.org].
With the newest update of the GFDL, the FSF introduced a new section, 11. RELICENSING, specifically designed to handle this update:
Re:Vote yes! (Score:4, Informative)
Mod parent up. That's the basic idea: GFDL was never really designed for something like Wikipedia, and CC-BY-SA accomplishes the same thing much more elegantly while preserving the intent of the GFDL.
One other issue is ease of compliance. The CC-BY-SA license only requires attribution "reasonable to the medium", including the author(s), title, and URI where applicable. The GFDL has the additional requirement that the entire text of the GFDL be included with every copy of any part of the work. This makes technical compliance much more difficult, and thus conflicts with Wikipedia's goal of widespread distribution in many mediums.
Re:The "later version" clause (Score:1, Informative)
>You can sign away all your rights,
Not really, there are several fundamental rights that a simple contract cannot contravene. lrn2law
Re:Vote yes! (Score:2, Informative)
The GFDL is one of the most non-free open source licenses available. It very rigidly controls how you can and cannot use the content.
In my case I was looking into the legal ramifications of offering a voip based version of wikipedia. I contacted the FSF about the legality of it and they said that audio reproductions aren't even permitted by the GFDL.
Sucks to be a blind person.
Additionally you can use the GFDL to create a kind of monopoly of information by adding some of the invariant section requirements to your content and a few other tricks.
If wikipedia had done something like that they could require a 30 page invariant section be included with any use... So if you wanted to copy an article for some educational site or other purpose you would also have to include the 30 pages in invariant crap along with it. This would severely devalue the use of the content outside the original site granting a near monopoly.
Technically you can also abuse a number of other of the FSF licenses for purposes like that and other anti-competitive purposes. Makes me wonder how long it will be used like that.
Re:There once was a page on WP about what WP was n (Score:2, Informative)
When it comes to matters of editing, it's not.
When it comes to matters of licensing, it is more so.
The vote doesn't actually determine the outcome. The board will analyze the votes and the results and decide the outcome.
The board could strike down the proposal even if it gets 90% support.
Copyright relicensing 101 (Score:3, Informative)
Because so many here are clueless about copyright licensing, I thought I'd give a brief explanation of what it entails.
See many people think that you can't relicense a work without explicit agreement of anybody and everybody who ever edited that work. Picture go through the mind like vast emails asking a submitter about the semicolon at the end of line 35,219 in one of over a million files.
But if that were the case, a work could basically NEVER be relicensed! You're never going to get explicit permission from everybody (or even a majority) who has submitted to wikipedia.
Instead, there's a legal process wherein the license change is proposed in a very public forum, clearly documented as such, for a 'reasonable' period of time which depends on the work in question, the number of people involved, and the reqirements of the legal jurisdiction(s) in question.
During this time, having been given legally recognized reasonable notice, copyright holdeers can either agree to the change (by doing nothing) or they can object to the claim and withdraw copyrights to their works. This process (or very similar) exists around the world and applies when there are many people holding copyrights to a shared work. In practice, it works something like the legal notice section in your local newspaper, only in this case, it's global. (you do know about the legal notice section in your local paper, right?)
IANAL and all that, but I have done a fair share of legal stuffi n pro per, etc....
But it may be more simple than that: when you submitted your work(s) to wikipedia, dd you READ the license you were submitting it under? In many cases (not necessarily Wikipedia) you are granting the copyrights themselves to the receiver. AFAIK, WP doesn't work this way or they wouldn't have become so popular.
So the question comes back to you: Do you disagree with the license change? And if not, which of your submissions do you object to them using under the new license?
Oppose it (Score:1, Informative)
I contributed to Wikipedia because it was GFDL, so that I could get improved versions of my articles back with GFDL. Now, if someone incorporates CC-only third party content into an article, I cannot get it back with GFDL. Therefore this licence removes my ability to use content, and as such I am opposed to it and this is what I am going to vote for. I ask open content comrades who agree with me to oppose Wikimedia's proposed changes as well.
On a political level, I trust RMS and GNU far more than Lessig and CC. I support both, but RMS is who I really trust.
Re:Will dual licensing fix their problem? (Score:3, Informative)
Not everything will be dual licensed. In particular, this allows Wikipedia to incorporate a large amount of media (images, sound, and video) that are CC-BY-SA licensed but aren't GFDL licensed. It also allows other projects that use CC-BY-SA (like other Wikis) to incorporate Wikipedia material without having to comply with the GFDL.
Re:Vote yes! - My stupid OSS license rant (Score:2, Informative)
If the Program specifies that a certain numbered version of the GNU General Public License âoeor any later versionâ applies to it, you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that numbered version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
Because your GPL v666 is not published by the FSF, you cannot relicense existing GPL'd software under it.